Being hopeful about the web with Paul Ford

This week on the interview episode of The Vergecast, editor of cheif of The Verge Nilay Patel sits down with CEO of Postlight Paul Ford. Paul Ford co-founded Postlight in 2015 and is a writer, product strategist, educator, programmer, and software consultant. If you read a lot of tech writing, you probably know Paul’s name. In 2015, Ford wrote an entire issue of Bloomberg’s Business Week titled “What is code?” which colorfully explained how programming works on the web for people who don’t do it. Recently, he wrote a piece in Wired about how we should still be hopeful and excited about tech and what it can still do for us. Theres a lot of negative conversation about tech lately — regulating huge companies, what Facebook and Amazon are doing wrong — but from someone who builds things for the web, Paul brings an optimistic look at how tech can positively and creatively impact our lives in a fun and exciting way. Paul comes in to talk about his hopefulness, his piece in Wired, the state of building stuff for the web, and how people think about tech today. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  Hey, everybody. It's Sean from The Vergecast. On this week's interview episode, we have Paul Ford. If you are an active Twitter user, somebody who reads a lot about tech, reads a lot of tech writing, you probably know Paul's name. He wrote an entire issue of Bloomberg Businessweek called "What is Code?" a few years ago. He's been writing about it ever since. He runs a product studio called Postlight here in New York City. And he recently wrote this piece I really like about how we should still be hopeful and excited about tech and what it can do for us in Wired. So I had Paul come in. We talked about that piece. We talked about sort of the state of building stuff for the web, the state of how people think about tech, what they're using, why they're using it. We just got into it. I've had so many conversations lately that are kind of inherently negative about tech. We constantly talk about regulating this industry, what Facebook is doing wrong.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  It was great to get that other perspective of someone who's still building stuff, in charge of building things for a lot of different people and companies, and is still hopeful about technology. So check it out. It's Paul Ford on The Vergecast.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Paul Ford, you're in the studio with me. Hello.

• 2:05Speaker 03

  It's lovely here. Thank you.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  It is. The studio is too nice for our show. That's what I've always believed.

• 2:10Speaker 03

  It's pretty good. It's pretty good. Nice acoustic deadening.

• 2:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:14Speaker 03

  Has happened here. I've got a lovely view.

• 2:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Paul, 2015. You were already on the scene, but I would say you burst into the collective consciousness of the world because Businessweek let you write an entire issue of their magazine.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Let's be clear. Not going to be a lot of those in my life. It was just like a weird pop culture moment.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:32Speaker 03

  When people wanted to know what programming was all about.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:37Speaker 03

  And, you know, I'm a nerdy writer who's been around for a while and the people at Businessweek went, yeah, write, write something. And then they kept going, let's keep writing, keep going, keep going. They gave me the whole issue.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 03

  And it just became a thing for a minute. Like, I've never been in the middle of a thing. Right? I'm a, I'm a now gray, chubby, you know, started out as a Pearl programmer. So the things weren't supposed to happen to me, but I did have my, that was my one thing. I got to go on Charlie Rose, which is a little less exciting than it used to be. But no one expected a hit, right? They just expected like, oh, quirky Businessweek. And then just millions of people were like, finally, someone explained what this thing is.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  So the issue of Businessweek was called What Is Code?

• 3:19Speaker 03

  What Is Code?

• 3:20Nilay Patel?

  It was literally the entire print issue of Businessweek.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  As a moment, a great online presentation. Unlike print, you can, if you're listening to this, you can just go look at that right now.

• 3:29Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 3:29Nilay Patel?

  You just wrote another piece for Wired. It is not, they did not give you the entire issue of Wired.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  No.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  I know they're my competitors to take a, a mistake to not give you the entire issue.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  I'm really glad not to have the whole issue. That's, it's awful to have the whole issue.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  What's the piece in Wired called?

• 3:42Speaker 03

  Why I Still, in parentheses, Love Tech: In Defense of a Difficult Industry.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  So you and I have been in the same circles. We've never actually sat down and had a conversation like this, but we've been.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  Weird, yeah.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  We've been around each other.

• 3:55Speaker 03

  But I'm glad we have media to intermediate between us.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  Let's, let's make a document.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  So why I still love tech in defense of a difficult industry. I've been talking to a lot of folks on the show for weeks and months. There's a lot of criticism of the tech industry. We had Shoshana Zuboff on the show. She wrote a book called Surveillance Capitalism. The business model of tech companies is bad. We talked to academics, politicians. They tell us it's time to regulate the tech industry. They've, they've gone too far. They have too much power. We should break them up. The whole thing. You're saying I still love this thing. It's hard, but I love it. Why do you love it?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Because you can make the little robot dance on the screen. I mean, it's really that simple. It's, first of all, all those people who are criticizing, tech can handle it. It's trillions of dollars now. Come on. It's okay. It's okay that somebody doesn't love your thing and say that you're the best thing that ever happened. Yeah, that, we gotta get over that part of it. The part that I still love, that's still real, is making the thing go, right? And so I got into this because I never thought anyone ever would let me write or do anything. And so you could go make a webpage and you could put your stuff up into the world and people would read it and connect to it. And it was like

• 5:09Speaker 03

  25 people and that just was wonderful. That was fantastic. That impact, that small amount of impact could be sort of had by anybody who had access to a computer, which again, not everybody has access to a computer, but still, the baseline has come down and you can really do things unlike television, unlike newspapers, unlike just about everything that came before, the whole thing could be manipulated. And what you do with that, from that point on, that's when the ethics start to really creep in. It gets tricky. Like, am I gonna spy on people with that? Or am I gonna make funny jokes? You know, in the case of Twitter, you can do both. And it's just like, it's that. And then there's a whole culture there. There's a culture of people who make things. What is the right way to arrange human beings and turn them into good contributors to a culture

• 5:54Speaker 03

  of shipping and making software? And there are a million arguments and discussions about the right way to do that. Literally many of them originate in this building from the chorus team, right? I mean, it's like, there's a culture. And the same is true of design and the same is true of of product management. And so I still think that that culture is really interesting and has an unbelievable, unbelievable amount to contribute. And I don't think people, even the critics would disagree with that, right? Like, I think there's just lots to do.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  What do you think is the, the sort of biggest disconnect between the critics and I am one?

• 6:28Speaker 03

  And me too.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  And the people who are building the stuff?

• 6:30Speaker 03

  Oh, boy. I Well, this is fundamental, right? There's no, it's not a culture of introspection. So if you grew up in a good liberal arts tradition, I did, and like you are used to interrogating the hell out of everything. And it's sort of like, is this good or bad? It doesn't matter, it's a book, it's a bug, it's a, it's a glass of water. Like, everything carries a huge amount of significance and there are, and it lives in an ecosystem of everything else. And that's, you know, your undergraduate semiotics class and all languages and sort of intertwined. And so you get into that, you really started to like see the world as this big connected thing with, you know, colonialism and, and sort of all sorts of economic shenanigans at the base.

• 7:16Speaker 03

  I don't get the sense when I talk to like a young startup person that that's how they see their stuff. They go on Hacker News and they read about startups and they see people who are making enormous amounts of money and having an enormous amount of impact. And they go, I want that. And I think what's unusual is because those two spaces are smashed into each other. You know, I don't think that like, you participate in technology culture. We're down by Wall Street right now talking like, there wasn't as much participation in the banking industry in the eighties and early nineties, when it was just going wild everywhere, right? You couldn't get close to it because it was so opaque and it was jargon driven and so on. And I feel that like with tech, you've got these worlds where everybody's colliding.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  Like, you know, people putting up their webpages and starting their zines. And over on the other side, you have, you know, relatively young people who are like, nah, man, I just want to get my startup and get paid. And it just, everybody's in the room together and they start fighting.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  This is what I really, I tricked you. This is what I really want to talk about, which is the web. So the, the actual democratizing force in tech, when we talk about tech broadly, was the web.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  God, yeah, it's so good.

• 8:23Nilay Patel?

  It was the thing. Like, the web browser shipped, actually, this is Marc Andreessen's line, the guy who created Netflix, was software's eating the world.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Right.

• 8:32Nilay Patel?

  We're going to interconnect all these businesses. Their businesses will become software businesses. The software will be, the money is. But it was, it was the web.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  I always feel that he sort of stops early in the digestive process, like then it's like software then is going to sort of poop out the rest of the world and then like.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  And here we are.

• 8:46Speaker 03

  What are we gonna do then, right?

• 8:48Nilay Patel?

  It's 2019.

• 8:49Speaker 03

  Eating is not the end game, right? Like, it's a system, right? It's a certain level. Are you gonna vomit the world back out or poop the world back out?

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  The world will then fertilize new worlds to come.

• 9:00Speaker 03

  That's what I love about that, though, is like, it's the tech industry going like, the most important thing is that fork gets in my mouth, right? After that, it's your problem.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  But it was the web. Yeah. I just want, that was the thing. And now, obviously, there are many other layers by which you can access a consumer. But the first thing that allowed a kid to start a zine and reach everybody was the web.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Tim Berners-Lee in his book about the web. So, Tim Berners-Lee is the, really the progenitor and inventor of the web. He created the, with a few other people, but it was, it was his baby. And in his book, he actually describes Marc Andreessen of that quote, um, really actively trying to commercialize and lock down access, right? And so what you had with Berners-Lee and with the early concept was, we need to create a tool that will take all the data that's scattered everywhere around the internet, which at this point could fit on your Apple Watch, but like, at that point, felt like a lot of data. And we need to make it easier to access. Rolodexes and, you know, and, and sort of information about people here at the high energy physics lab that I work at and so on, and also pages of content, especially physics papers, and we'll link them together.

• 10:07Speaker 03

  And it was that simple. And then, because of the network effects and because people had Unix servers floating around, suddenly you had this thing out in the world. Real software people didn't take it seriously. They're like, oh, my God, what is this? This is nonsense. Everybody, I remember in the 90s, like, everybody was just like, no, there, there, there's much better ways to do this, trust me. The hypertext people thought it was silly and the, the internet people were like, nah, Gopher's better. And just all these ridiculous things that now are kind of footnotes.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  And

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  My co-host Eater is from Minnesota, so I often give him shit that Gopher,

• 10:41Speaker 03

  Gopher, yeah.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  University of Minnesota protocol was like patent encumbered, so it lost.

• 10:45Speaker 03

  That was it. That was it. Openness is very, very powerful. And it's not the ultimate tool for everything you might ever do, but it's very, very powerful if it hits at the right moment. And so what you had was this publishing platform that was so easy. And that's the part that I really, that's changed is it used to be so easy to put something online. Now, it was harder than going to Medium and typing things in the box. It's harder than publishing with a CMS. But it was like being a participant in that world on a kind of equal playing field. There was like a short period where everybody got to play.

• 11:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:16Speaker 03

  And kind of was at the same level.

• 11:18Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so that was then, and the web built these businesses. It enabled, it enabled our business.

• 11:24Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

  You now run a development studio called Postlight.

• 11:27Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 11:27Nilay Patel?

  And enabled your business. What does Postlight do exactly?

• 11:29Speaker 03

  We are, um, we're a product studio, meaning product management, design, engineering. You come to us sometimes, places much like this one come to us and say, build our big CMS platform. We work for

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  And you run screaming. You're like, no.

• 11:44Speaker 03

  No, we've, come on in. Come on in. And then they're like, what about WordPress? We're like, okay, um, we've got a lot of content management, a lot of NGOs. And then because we're New York City, a lot of institutional banking and insurance clients.

• 11:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  So just exactly what you'd expect.

• 12:01Nilay Patel?

  So you're building web stuff for people?

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Um, yes, except you don't say web stuff anymore because that doesn't sound like, you know, fancy.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, product studio.

• 12:09Speaker 03

  Product studio.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  Oh, and what you're really delivering, this is what's tricky. You're not making web pages that much anymore. You're building like the API underneath or you're, you're combining three or four APIs. And, and so you're speaking data. And then, you know, you're, you're setting that up on, on a cloud service provider. And then you're building a web app that talks to that as well as maybe mobile web apps or mobile apps. Right? So these are like, we're in this world where it's everything is APIs talking to platforms instead of pages being loaded in browsers. That's where the language has gone.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Is the web doomed? This, when I said I brought you in to trick you.

• 12:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  This is the trick.

• 12:47Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm No, I mean, literally every morning I bolt upright shrieking.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, look, if you just look at it, you have mobile apps, right? Apple seems very intent on moving consumers into its app ecosystem for a variety of reasons, good and bad. Google feels less so, but a lot of that going on over there on the Android side as well. You have Facebooks of the world, which are sort of pulling people into an ecosystem that is web accessible, or I would say web adjacent in many ways. And you have other platforms, Twitter, Tumblr, YouTube. These are, we're gonna suck you into platform world and you're gonna live by the rules of the platform and that the web is just the place where you go to the platforms as opposed to the place where you go to the people.

• 13:30Speaker 03

  I mean, that's, and Microsoft was gonna do that before too. Like, people keep trying. My co-founder is way more of a hard-nosed business person than I am, although I've become more hard-nosed since we started the company. But still, like, he's tougher. And he's just like, oh, no, man, I would never bet against it. It is, there's something about an open platform that shows up and can do just about enough that works everywhere and that ends up working. Like, you know, I got a nice Pixel phone now. I moved over from iOS and the mobile web browser on that is just fine for just about everything I do. And I forget that there are apps half the time. And Google's got like, oh, no, this is like an app, but it's also a web. And I'm just like, I don't care, man. Just give me that app. Like, it still works.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  And the other thing too, you load up that first webpage, mm, it's looking good. It's still going fine. You know, you're 25 years in now or thereabouts and all the old stuff still works pretty good. Mobile sort of threw everybody a curveball, but we figured that out too. So I still, look, it's so big now. This is the other thing too. Like, you had a tech industry back in the day that wasn't, you know, Wall Street was much bigger. Now you have this thing, this entity that is almost like a substrate of all culture, just like banking is and finance, or just like the concept of money. Like, money and tech are two separate concepts, right? So you can't say that, I don't think you can really go like, there is one technology,

• 14:55Speaker 03

  there is one web, or there is one anything anymore. I mean, it used to be that you, web standards as created by the World Wide Web Consortium defined what the web really is. I don't think that that's, now it's more complicated and sort of like the browsers get to say it, except that Firefox has sort of, you know, reemerged as a pretty fast, pretty good browser. I just switched over to it again and like. I know.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  Everyone lives on this roller coaster.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  I know.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  No, exactly. This is your Firefox season.

• 15:23Speaker 03

  This is my season of Firefox. That is right. You know, but no, I don't. Look, it would be really convenient for everyone if they controlled the means of all communication. You know, I mean, Facebook and Apple. And then they're like, look, man, we would just really want to help our consumers. I think they believe it, but it's just this messy, sloppy pile of standards and technologies just keeps asserting itself.

• 15:47Nilay Patel?

  So when you are out and you're building for your big clients and they're like, we need AMP.

• 15:52Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  Like AMP is taking, it's taking over. It's right. I mean, like, that is the conversation. We've had the head of AMP on the show.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. And Malte was like, we're just trying to make it faster. We're not trying to colonize the web.

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Okay, here's where it gets.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  And the pushback is every little thing kills the web.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Look, okay, so I used to be a magazine editor. There was another editor there. And I remember one day I was at Harper's Magazine, which is a very progressive magazine and very, oh, it's a good way to describe. Just people there were very smart and assured of their intelligence. And I don't remember why, but I was outraged about the New York Times that day.

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Who isn't?

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Just, you know, you have a day. It's the, it's the hometown paper and they piss you off. So I went into the senior editor's office and I was like, and I won't, I won't sell him out because he's now at the New York Times. But I was, but I was like, oh, the time.

• 16:42Nilay Patel?

  The way of all things.

• 16:43Speaker 03

  Blah, blah, blah. The Times, he was just like, listen, dude, come on. It contains multitudes. There are lots of people who work there doing great work and there's amazing stories. You're just angry today. And I don't, he didn't mean that to be like, let me blow your mind. But I thought about it over and over because it's like, it's just simple, but true. It's like the thing that outrages you and drives you bananas is often has these aspects that are really valuable. Google is just at such a scale. Like the AMP project, they decided that they would make a better web for mobile and they would make it really faster to load pages. And they said, well, what do we need to do? And they kind of worked backwards from first principles. And then they said,

• 17:24Speaker 03

  okay, let's have an open standard, but not like, let's not go too open because there's so much friction when you go purely open for everybody. We still need to drive this thing. It's about our ecosystem. And AMP, you know, you're supposed to be able to cache pages. So we'll make a really good cache. We'll make the best cache possible here at Google. Well, then that means like suddenly all the pages are hosted from Google. And so the way I don't look, I'm kind of at a point in my life where it's not like I'm done with right or wrong, but it's just when you look at the platform companies, they have power, they exist. And it is impossible to hit a button and make them stop being what they are. Right? So, so then you have to say, what is, what does Google want? Right? And when you talk to people at Google, and I think this is real top to bottom, they're

• 18:08Speaker 03

  like, we want a healthy media ecosystem. We want like, we want

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  That is true. They have said that to me.

• 18:14Speaker 03

  They want only good things. They'll look you in the eyes. Google cares about real estate ads, right? Which used to be something that the media kind of controlled. Now Google's got it. And so you're playing in that world. And I think there's an element of ego where the media is like, you know, wait, what is this? Is this for us or not? And Google's going like, no, AMP pages are cool. They'll let you look at house listings and browse videos and do all sorts of stuff. And there's a great ad product in here that's really fast and works really well. And that's their universe.

• 18:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 03

  And then they, they present that to you and you go as a, as like a media person and you're like, is this going to take money out of my pocket? And they're like, well, no, it's actually, you know, it's monetizing just fine. But then here's what's tricky. You get all invested and you do all this AMP work and you, you know, it takes a team of three, like a couple of months and you've spent about $150,000 inside your organization purely on your AMP migration. And you gotta then cross your fingers that Google still cares.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Right? It's the scale, right? So is God going to reach down and sort of pat you on the head? Or if he forgets, will he sort of like knock your head right off?

• 19:17Nilay Patel?

  Also, like the implicit promise of AMP, you do that work, you spend that money, the implicit promises, and then you will rank higher.

• 19:24Speaker 03

  No, that's right.

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  And they won't make that promise because they know that's very problematic.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  That's right. But you kind of got to get in there. And it's not even wink, nod. They're just like, well, the pages will be semantically better, like. It's just hard.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  It's a mess. And you know, if you're a big platform company and 150 grand isn't that big a deal of internal budget move around. And you put Susie and Sam on that for a couple of months and they do the AMP integration and it monetizes at 12% better, but over your traffic that that's, you know, that adds up to about quarter million dollars a year, you're pretty happy with AMP. And if it adds up to $15,000 a year, you need, it's going to take you 10 years to make your investment back and you feel really bad about it.

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  So that's a lot of pressure. I mean, even on a big organization.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 20:11Nilay Patel?

  That's a lot of time. That's a lot of energy.

• 20:13Speaker 03

  Well, and not.

• 20:14Nilay Patel?

  Not spent.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  They'll tell you like, no big deal, man. This will take like five minutes, but it's, everybody's CMS is such a mess that nothing is easy turnkey like that.

• 20:23Nilay Patel?

  Somehow I knew this would end up as a CMS conversation. The reason I'm asking is that's a lot of, that's a lot of money, effort, time spent platform dancing.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Instead of building new kinds of web experiences. And I haven't seen a big new app on the web that's been really interesting in quite a long time.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  No, not in our world. The world that is getting all the money and all the energy is software as a service. That people are very excited about new CER. There are more things that have Kanban board interfaces in the world than have ever been before, right? Like move those cards along.

• 20:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:57Speaker 03

  There's actually relatively like content is locking down into the, the product that you guys make, Chorus, Arc for the like the high velocity from the Washington Post for like the high velocity stuff. And then WordPress is kind of everywhere else. And then there's a few like sort of more branding and marketing ones like Adobe Experience Manager and Sitecore and then kind of everybody else. And that's, that's global, right? So it's like now, how many programmers are in this building right now, working on Chorus in ways that focus on monetization and revenue, which are what the big players need, right? You're years ahead. Okay. So like, what's going to blow up and disrupt that so that a new player could show up? Nobody knows. And if something blows up and disrupts it, then people will.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  But for the most part, everybody else is like, oh, I see a niche over here for smaller publications, or this, or that, or this kind of, you know, or the whole ad tech world. They're looking for niches as opposed to big platforms and they gotta make do with that.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  I feel like my CEO is gonna come beat down my door if I don't tell people what Chorus is.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Do it.

• 21:59Nilay Patel?

  Chorus is a platform that The Verge publishes on. It's our CMS. It's proprietary. It has, to Paul's point, a revenue engine next to it called Concert, which is a programmatic ad thing that run a lot of the ads you see on the site. That's it. I'm not here to pitch my own company's products.

• 22:14Speaker 03

  This is important for the world.

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  I just want to tell people what it is.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  This is what's real, right, is that you used to get software and now you get this sort of service and platform that has an understanding of how your business works. So at some level, Chorus is also as a service, right? Like, nobody-

• 22:29Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely, absolutely.

• 22:30Speaker 03

  You can't download it and just run it on your, you know, your Windows XP box and experiment.

• 22:35Nilay Patel?

  No, you pay us, we run it for you.

• 22:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 22:37Nilay Patel?

  So my question is, there was a ti- I would say, early 2000s, there's this like raft of extremely interesting consumer web apps that just appear. Twitter is like-

• 22:46Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 22:47Nilay Patel?

  I think the first one I think of, right? Appeared at South by Southwest. We're all gonna read TechCrunch that day and use Twitter that night. And on and on it goes.

• 22:57Speaker 03

  Kaboom. Yeah.

• 22:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't see that anymore. I don't see that. Every new app, TikTok, right, is, I would say, the parallel to that now.

• 23:04Speaker 03

  It's variation on a theme.

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  Right, but that is a mobile-first native app on phones. It is barely a web property.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Right. Well, I mean, but, you know, the funny thing is that, yes, but if you look at the underlying infrastructure, everything's a web property.

• 23:19Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  Like, it's, you know, things speak HTTP and like all the, I'm not gonna throw acronyms at your poor listeners, but like-

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  That's what they're here for.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  I know, but like, the systems underneath, the things that make the apps interesting and engaging and have communities are all web technologies.

• 23:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  And the app often tends to display a little web browser inside of the app, except it's all wrapped up in the app. And so like there, you know, it's this one, it's this app you download, but the text is all HTML. Or, you know, just like, so the web isn't really going away. It's the shorthand that everybody understands for, I need to put some words on a screen, or I need to do like 30 or 40 things that you usually do. It just all gets wrapped up in these little packages. And so, uh, but yeah, the real-

• 24:06Speaker 03

  I don't know. I mean, why do you think?

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I'm Dieter, who I mentioned before, has an article that he links to all the time called A Brief Definition of the Web, which is a response exactly to the point you just made, which is web technologies are everywhere.

• 24:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 24:21Nilay Patel?

  But that is not the web.

• 24:22Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 24:23Nilay Patel?

  So here's Dieter's definition, a brief definition of the web. To count as being part of the web, your app or page must be linkable and allow any client to access it. That is not true of TikTok on your phone.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  Not true. That's exactly right.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  There's some content in TikTok that is accessible.

• 24:36Speaker 03

  Oh, there's always, it's like Instagram is a good example. You can kind of get to it on the web.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  You can't get Instagram DMs on the web.

• 24:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's right.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Right, like the full Instagram experience is not there.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  No, what makes Instagram Instagram is not like what you can see when you go to Instagram.com. It's just, it is, it is the app.

• 24:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So my question is, if that's what's happening, we're taking all these web technologies that allowed your business to thrive, that allowed our business to thrive, that we are now selling, but you know, WordPress exists, Arch exists. Like, there's all these software platforms for the web that you can just buy and then now people are in your platform.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  But if the thing that enabled it was linkable, allow any client to access it, and that's being shoved into apps, what is the push and pull dynamic? Like, if you're hopeful about tech, it seems to me the thing that everyone is most hopeful about was this democracy of access.

• 25:24Speaker 03

  I know, but boy, did we learn. Okay, so look, I mean, deep down, what do I believe in my heart? A, they can't take it away. Browsers work and I can publish a webpage and put it up in the world.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 03

  And if it really has a message that the world needs to hear, they'll probably, I'll get, you know, between seven or eight readers. No, I mean, there is a, things are cheaper than they've ever been and you can produce and distribute ideas at an extraordinary velocity. The problem is platform lock-in and also just the way these ecosystems work, right? Like, one of, a thing that's real in our world is like, people talk about regulation a lot. Regulation is the Apple Terms of Service, right? Like, I'm not, I don't have to think too much about the law because Apple's going to tell me what's allowed on the App Store and Google's going to tell me what's allowed and I'll probably inherit a lot of those decisions for the web app version as well, right? Like, they are the interpreters. So there's a lot of convenience there.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  And at some level, I just have to be like, it's okay. This is a big new world. We're in the middle. We're, I don't know, like, you know, there is this possible future where Amazon and Google drones are fighting over us and, you know, raining cameras down on our heads to take pictures of us. Everyone gets a Ring camera. It's just for all their neighbors forever. Yeah, exactly. Right. And that, is that as ridiculous as it used to be? Not anymore? No. I mean, because it's gotten really casual. Like, we're now, because, yeah, the Ring camera could show up. They could mail one to you tomorrow and you'd be like, huh? Yeah. What's going on here? And, you know, is it possible that in your life, you could write an article that's like, I always thought I would hate all this surveillance that was

• 27:00Speaker 03

  in my, you know, blah, blah, but I kind of love it. Like, they can get you. They're good. They're good at marketing. They're good at messaging. And the trade offs in the giant platforms are pretty cool. You get a lot of toys to play with. Will people want to connect to something smaller? Will they want to make a little, here's, my thing is always, when you could go to your router and plug a little, like, tiny gumstick sized computer into a USB port, and that's your social network for like, you and your friends? If that ever became popular, if like, teens no longer wanted to be on platforms because they were lame, but somehow got really into sysadminning Unix, you know, I mean, this is what's tricky. It's never cool. Like, the hard part that you need to build the community

• 27:42Speaker 03

  and the connection is still hard and requires a lot of knowledge. And, and it doesn't, it's not sociable in the way that like, playing guitar is sociable. Right. You started a server called Tilda Club? Yeah. Describe it. Okay. So, this is one of those things that you, you ever have the side project where you're like, oh God, what have I done? And then it's a little source of guilt for the rest of your life? I had a couple of drinks one night, and I created a website called Tilda Club. It used to be in the olden days that you're, which, I'm trying not to talk about the olden days, but fuck the hell with it. All right. So, Tilda, you'd have a website and it'd be like, It's your username. Some server.com, yeah. Slash, Tilda character, your username. And so I created

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Tilda Club because it sounded ridiculous. And it was just a Unix machine. And I gave, like, people accounts. And I went to bed and I gave like 10 people accounts as a joke on Twitter. And then I woke up and there were like a thousand requests and then 7,000. And I got to like 500 and then I was like, what am I doing? I have children. But people got on that server and they made webpages and they just partied like it was 99, but it was new novel sort of fun stuff. And after that, there were all these new servers that came up in the quote till diverse and people started creating all kinds of new environments to play and mess with this. And Tilda Club is actually still running. And somebody asked if they could take it over. And I said, yeah, we should do that. And then I keep forgetting. Smart software.

• 29:10Speaker 03

  At this point, I'd love to save the $50 a month. But no, but so Tilda Club is a, when you say it's just a Unix server. Just, it was a literally on Amazon. FTPing up like files. Yeah, they have accounts. I just gave it to them. Could they run like CGI's? I don't think I turned it on. I kept, I tried to keep it under control. Yeah. What you find is, you know, after you get to that, what is it Dunbar's number 150? You get after that and suddenly the behavior of human beings is a lot harder to manage. And so I just didn't want, there's this thing with aggregate humanity, which I know you run into too, where it just becomes like monkeys hitting the bone. And I didn't, I was trying

• 29:51Speaker 03

  to avoid that. I've had that so many times in my career. I just, I didn't want the monkey bone smashing feeling of the fun side project with the community. Yeah. So no, it was this wonderful, like, I would say month long party of people making stuff and engaging with some of the reasons why they like the medium. That's still there. I can go buy a Raspberry Pi for the computer for, you know, 30, 40 bucks and I can put it on the internet and I can send a signal to a million people if I can find a million people. And again, like the challenge now is nobody's looking because the platforms are sort of constantly flowing, except honestly, if that has a good URL and somebody on Twitter sees it, that content could get out there. Yeah. Same with Facebook. Like it's just.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  You are reliant on the platforms in a way you didn't used to be. I don't think people go to Google and poke around for fun anymore, right?

• 30:42Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a little, well, I think people go to YouTube and poke around for fun.

• 30:46Speaker 03

  That is true, but that's, that's a closed, that's a hermetically sealed universe. They won't even let you click the links.

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  When you think about what a healthier ecosystem would look like, it is nice when the platforms like allow your content to get distributed and it's expensive to actually put video online. Like it is really not easy to host a lot of streaming video for lots of people who want it. And so that's a good thing that they do. It's very valuable. It's just if we could have a hundred Youtubes or a thousand so that there was some competition between all the Youtubes as opposed to just-

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  Constant theme of the show.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, right. Like, I mean, that's, and but again, you know, wouldn't it be nice? And I feel that sometimes in this industry, we're like, oh, you know, there should be a utopian state that should exist because it's in my head and I'm a dude who likes tech and I think it should be this way. And then the world is not really gonna do that. Like, it's not like Google's like, oh, you know, you're right. We need to split up YouTube. The government could do it if it could figure out what the hell's going on. They're trying, you know?

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  But like, why, so post light, why don't you, has any client come to you and said, we want to build a competitor to YouTube?

• 31:50Speaker 03

  No, not in 2019.

• 31:52Nilay Patel?

  And it doesn't seem like anyone's that interested in doing such a thing.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  No, the only people who, who do that are literally like, they see some Facebook ad and it's like a 19 year old who's like, I'm gonna make a new YouTube, but it's all gonna be about cargo pants. And you're like, cool, what's your budget? And they're like, what?

• 32:07Nilay Patel?

  I would love to be in one of those meetings for you where you're like, have to gently let down a teenager who wants to do cargo pants YouTube.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Just do it. Just, I'll, I'll do it all the time. I've let down so many hundreds of people at this point. I have, I have talked to 200 people about their CMSs.

• 32:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  No, but I mean, that's the thing. Like, where is that energy?

• 32:25Speaker 03

  It's out there. It's just, they grew up in the world with the platforms, not with the web. So they're thinking, I want to do X on Spotify. I want to create this and put it on YouTube. They're thinking, you know, I mean, remember in Parks and Rec where Aziz Ansari had Entertainment 720 or whatever. It's like that.

• 32:42Nilay Patel?

  It's my, absolutely my favorite arc on that entire show.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Exactly. Everybody wants that. They're like, I'm gonna build a multimedia conglomerate and they skip ahead to it. They're gonna build the podcast network. They're gonna build the, you know, the 360. No, go to 720. And it's, that's what I see coming up. I don't know. It's kind of great. I hope, I hope it succeeds. It's a lot of stuff that isn't for me. I don't, you know, okay, create your fashion brand and your podcast network. Recent NYU grad, like, you know, and I don't know if you remember too, there's this, this moment in your twenties where everyone is incredibly jealous of incredibly small things and nobody has actually accomplished anything yet. So you get that vibe too. Like everybody's trying to kind of outpace their friends fantasies to show that they're the real hustler.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  And so, so there's that, there's that. But I love it. I love the energy.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's, it's my favorite thing. I mean, I am a capitalist and that's like, that's the animating force. I think we should probably put some tighter guardrails around it. I think that would be good.

• 33:43Speaker 03

  Like, I think anybody who lives in a very, anyone who takes public transportation in New York City is like, yeah, we gotta, it's, I like a little capitalism, but we also gotta like figure some stuff out.

• 33:53Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great if we sorted that out.

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. I mean, also the whole city is gonna be underwater in like two hours.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  It was underwater yesterday.

• 33:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I know. So it's like, I'm excited. I'm excited. I like hustling. I like making money and I've loved building this company. Especially I have a very good, like the co-founder, my co-founder Rich and I, like it worked out real good. I lucked out in my partner. But there's another part of me that's excited about the trillions of dollars of global warming investment that is going to be necessary to keep Manhattan from evaporating. And I'm like, that could be cool. I wonder what's gonna happen there.

• 34:26Speaker 04

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• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  So let's talk, just to end up on, let's talk about building stuff.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Because you wrote a piece about how building stuff is good, gives you hope. We've talked a lot about the environment in which you build stuff now. It's radically different than a few years ago. But right at the beginning of this conversation, you said, we got to lace in the ethics maybe a little bit earlier, right?

• 35:45Speaker 03

  Wait, what did I say about ethics?

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  You were like, the platforms got big, there's not a lot of introspection.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  It would be good if we maybe talked about it a little bit earlier in the process.

• 35:54Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  So you're, you know, product manager, you probably talked to a lot of product managers, you've built a lot of stuff. How do you think that's changed? And how do you think we make that better? So that we preserve the spirit of hope and excitement?

• 36:07Speaker 03

  Well, I think, first of all, there's just a lot of work to do, so that part's good. Like, you know, everybody's got a digital platform sitting around the, as we're talking, I'm looking out at skyscrapers, there are 700 to 2,000 badly decaying digital platforms within eyesight. Right? So, so there's that, there's just a lot to do, there's lots of work.

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I'm looking out the window, like, oh my God, is the building gonna fall?

• 36:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, they're all gonna fall. Yeah, no, I mean, the air conditioning monitoring system is falling apart, or the, the website hasn't been updated, or the trading platform doesn't work. Like, all of those things are still real. So, in terms of hope, first of all, I don't think product and product management is, is hurting for hope. And you have to be hopeful to be a product manager, because products don't want to ship. Like, most things in the world don't want to get across the line. So there is a fundamental optimism that has to be paired with a willingness to say no and sort of all that stuff. I think there's lots of things that are really complicated and big and weird in the world, and the platform companies are confusing and messy. We're in a platform company talking right now, we're going to make something. That's exciting.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  The thing that is still mind boggling, and maybe this is just the adolescent, like, model train part of myself, is that it gets cheaper to do more every day. Now, it's hard and it's rigid because you have to make the app-like experiences. You can't just publish a page anymore and so on. But like, my old website, ftrain.com, which, don't take that as an endorsement, nobody needs to look at that.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  It used to cost me a hundred dollars a year, or a hundred dollars a month to host, just to have a good server that could handle a reasonable amount of traffic and so on. And I let that sit for like, a couple of years while we got postsite rolling, and then one weekend, I'm like, I gotta stop spending this money. This is ridiculous. It cost me a dollar ninety-nine a month to run now, because I use this thing called Zeit, and I just like, put it on the Zeit, static hosting, there's some command lines I run, I have no clue what's happening. I don't know where it is, I don't know what's working. I cut and paste it from a tutorial, and it is like, it's either a dollar ninety-nine or two forty-nine, and it works great. Everything works just fine. It's, and I have this archive going back twenty years that is stable and secure, and

• 38:28Speaker 03

  I have it backed up in case that goes away. And if I used, Amazon could probably get it down even further. So, it's getting cheaper to do more, but it is not an environment that rewards the vast and ridiculous creativity that we saw in the early days. And I think it would. I think that just a little more ridiculousness would be welcomed, because it's very inexpensive to be ridiculous at scale.

• 38:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, we ran a piece today about Plex.

• 38:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:57Nilay Patel?

  Bijan Steven read it. It's a great piece. And it's just about little communities that pop up.

• 39:02Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 39:03Nilay Patel?

  Sharing a Plex server. It's basically about piracy, just to be blunt. And before everyone tweets at me, yes, I know there are legitimate uses for Plex. I see you people ripping your entire Blu-ray collections onto a Mac. You're great. But the larger uses of Plex are these little communities that form. Little baby social networks.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  Piracy communities are so much fun.

• 39:22Nilay Patel?

  They're really great, but I'm missing that, right? These small, Tilly Club is another example.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  This is a small community.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  Tilly Club got too big.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  It got too big. You're saying it got too big at like 150 people.

• 39:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, it did. I think a nice size for a community is 30.

• 39:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:38Speaker 03

  Right? And this is what's tricky is because can't get famous on 30. 30 can't pay your bills. 30 doesn't really care that much if you're like playing in a band. Like, it's just community at that point. There's none of the narcissistic rewards that we love so much. I mean, I love it. I like having all my Twitter followers. It's very exciting. But if I could have like, and I know who'd be in my 30, it would be like this one guy who's a little bit older than me. He used to be a student of my dad's and we used to.

• 40:04Nilay Patel?

  You're basically putting the other wedding guest list.

• 40:06Speaker 03

  It is, but no, no, no. It's specific though. It's like a couple dudes who are really, a couple dudes who are probably a little too into prog rock. And like, you know, like some, the person who.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  This is great.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, you know.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  Actually, make the whole list so that everybody, when we promote the episode, everyone has to listen to see if they made the cut.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  That's right. No, you know, where you see some of it is the little, like the Tumblr cohorts that are really specific on a topic. And they're like, they're just digging and archiving and digging up experiences and sort of putting it together. But getting away from the broader platforms, there's no need for, let's be real, right? Like with a nicely instrumented $10 raspberry pi plugged in the USB, in the USB and the ability to get on the network or a really tiny cloud server, I should be able to host lots of media and have lots of fun and chat and conversation with 30 friends for probably like $15 a year.

• 41:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  So the platform's there. We have access. There could be, then there's, there's all sorts of stuff to make this work. It's a little clunky around the edges. And I think that the other problem too is like streaming platforms have made the piracy less valuable. Like it used to be like, you gotta see this. This is an obscure bootleg from the band that we care about. And now it's, it's probably on Spotify, or it's close enough that you're just like, I don't need to.

• 41:26Nilay Patel?

  You can definitely find a slightly sped up version on YouTube.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. That's right. That's right. So it doesn't cr- catch the algorithm.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I mean, is that a thing that we should be looking at is can we build smaller networks of people, smaller communities?

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Are we ready to let go of the tens of thousands of people possibly telling you how interesting and important you are every single day? And the thing is, it's kind of rigid, right? Like, I feel, part of me would really, I think you can probably have both. Part of me would like to really just take a step back, but I have a business. I promote my business. I talk about things. Me being in public and having conversations like this one is an important part of like, doing a job in 2019. And so like, where am I going to put my energy and time? And, and right now, I'm probably putting more energy into being outward facing. But yeah, the thing I crave is just like goofing off with your friends.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  Building stuff for fun.

• 42:21Speaker 03

  Just being silly. I miss the silly. And I'm making, and there's private slacks and stuff like that.

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that, that one of the spirits of the earlier one that I missed was building silly stuff just for fun, to see if you could pull it off.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  And a lot of that stuff basically was digital vandalism.

• 42:37Speaker 03

  It was, or you just, you know, it's just sucking. You knew you sucked. It was fine.

• 42:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Speaker 03

  But then there's something so demoralizing about 5,000 people telling you exactly why you suck. And you're just like, I guess I shouldn't, okay.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So I have two ideas for your product studio.

• 42:52Speaker 03

  Oh, we're going to build something together?

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  We're building something. We're going to, we're going to build a turnkey Raspberry Pi. You stick it in the back of your router.

• 42:58Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 42:58Nilay Patel?

  It's a hardware social network.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  You know, I've thought about this a lot. The problem is getting that port open at the router level. Like it's, because the, it's not.

• 43:05Nilay Patel?

  That's fine. We've had tons of router company CEOs. I'll call, we'll get like Nick Weaver from Eero.

• 43:09Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 43:10Nilay Patel?

  It'll be a special button.

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Yeah. Cause the problem is like, I mean, nobody's the cable. It's like Optimum doesn't want to open up port 8080. You gotta, that's like a phone call and then you gotta get the right person.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  All right, we got to see, I don't think the CEO of Optimal wants to come on this show. There's a lot of like other things to talk about with a cable co-executive.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  What about port 80? Hey, guys.

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  Hold on a minute. So you have no competition, you've been subtly raising prices and your service is bad, but I really want this one port open.

• 43:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:35Nilay Patel?

  Hardware, social network startup idea.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  Listen, it would be worth it.

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  All right, hardware, social networks.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  I, boy, would that be fun. Yeah, let's do it.

• 43:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, well, it's like BBSs, but, but smaller.

• 43:46Speaker 03

  Just, I mean, what, okay, just take a pause for a second.

• 43:48Nilay Patel?

  I was like a deep BBS nerd, so.

• 43:50Speaker 03

  Right, and what do people want? They wanna, they wanna leave a, they wanna write a little graffiti on the wall.

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:54Speaker 03

  Be like, I was here. They wanna share some files. What else?

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think there's, there's.

• 43:59Speaker 03

  That's it, right? It doesn't have to be that complicated. It's photos.

• 44:02Nilay Patel?

  Well, they wanna find people to share. I mean, like Reddit is this idea at scale.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Right, but how do I keep it small?

• 44:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 44:08Speaker 03

  It's gotta stay small.

• 44:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, you, you clearly are rate limited by the power of your Raspberry Pi.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  It's brutal, right, though, because if you say it's 30 and then someone has to come and someone has to go.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  Now, I'm telling you, this is 100%. All you're doing is making a wedding guest list.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Oh, it's just mean.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  This is how my wedding was 450 people.

• 44:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 44:24Nilay Patel?

  This is the thing. How do you keep it smaller when some people have a much higher threshold for knowing people? All right, here's the second thing.

• 44:31Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  That I think you should do is you should promote your podcast, which is why you came on this podcast. So tell us about that and we'll wrap it up.

• 44:37Speaker 03

  Thank you for this opportunity. Yeah, if, if you like the sound of my voice, and who wouldn't? You should check out Track Changes from Postlight. Just go to postlight.com. You'll, you will find it right away. It is a weekly podcast that I do with my co-founder, Richard Ziotti, all about how technology is changing the world. But also, if you're really into like, what the hell is enterprise software and what is product? We're, we're the place to go.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  What is product?

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Well, we get a lot of different definitions. What I would say is it's a, it's a social craft, more than anything, in which you take the energy of designers and the energy of engineers and you, you help and coordinate with them, and often with other stakeholders, to make the thing happen and to get it shipped across the line. So sometimes, different kinds of product managers. Some people are like writing the document and saying, here's what we're gonna build. Some are just every day sitting down with the team. But you're, you're, you're coordinating the development of the product and you are. Managing scope, cutting scope, working on budgets, like making, making it real. At a large org, we're client service, so we're mostly focused on shipping the thing. At a big company, a product manager is also usually responsible for revenue.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Like this thing that we're launching has to make a hundred million dollars a year.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that seems terrifying.

• 45:57Speaker 03

  It's a lot of money. No, that is, when you go work for the big platform companies, it's like, what, you know, what do you do as a PM? Well, I'm responsible, I have to in 18 months, develop a product with an a hundred million dollar run rate. But you do that because you're already on top of something that makes billions. So you're like, okay, instead of oranges, we're gonna sell lemons. And then, and they're like, and we'll get more markup on the lemons. And they're like, wow, that added up to a hundred million dollars. You get a bonus.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  That sounds a lot easier and harder than what I do.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:23Nilay Patel?

  One of the reasons I'm in journalism, I'm like, I'm over here from the revenue.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's.

• 46:26Nilay Patel?

  It happens over there. It's great.

• 46:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's always, you definitely, stay away from the money is a great plan for your career.

• 46:33Nilay Patel?

  I'm working on it.

• 46:34Speaker 03

  That's what I would tell everyone in journalism. Now, don't ever understand the business.

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  No, God.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's foolish.

• 46:39Nilay Patel?

  That's another 45 minutes of us talking about the past and the future. Paul Ford, thank you so much for joining us.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  It's exciting, exciting.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  It is really truly odd that we have known of each other and around each other for so long, we've never sat down and talked.

• 46:52Speaker 03

  It's a big city. It's still a big industry.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:55Speaker 03

  All right. Well, thank you.

• 46:56Nilay Patel?

  Thanks for coming on. All right, that was Paul Ford. My thanks to him for joining us. You can check out his show, Track Changes. It's all about product management. It's great. I encourage you to listen to it. We'll be back on Friday with more Vergecast. We'll be back on Tuesday with more interview. We're just gonna keep it going. We've got some surprises in store for you coming up on the feed, though. I'm excited about those. You can tweet at me, I'm at Reckless. Would love to hear from you. Love your feedback on the show. Hear who you want me to talk to, what you want me to get into. We're here for you. We'll see you on Friday.

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